Thursday, October 27, 2011

Following up on Saturday's point that Russia was a particularly poor pre-industrial society, I had the opportunity yesterday to go round the National Gallery in Washington D.C. quickly, which has many paintings drawn from about 800 years of European art. There are remarkably few that show scenes of every day life with ordinary people: the first few hundred years are almost exclusively religious art, and after that the dominant form is portraits of rich people. However, I picked a few that seemed illustrative from the 1600s in the Netherlands and France. At that time, the Netherlands was the wealthiest European society with France perhaps in third or fourth place behind England and Spain. So between these and the Russian paintings we can get a sense of the full range of the standard of living of ordinary people in pre-industrial agrarian societies.

The picture at top is "A View on a High Road" by Meinart Hobbema from 1665, and is perhaps the most directly comparable to the view of the Russian village from Saturday's post. The low quality of the roads is pretty similar but the houses are rather better (though still very small and in very ill repair by modern standards).

Next is "Workmen Before an Inn" by Isack von Ostade from 1645:

This was commerce 17th century style. And then from France we have "A French Interior" by Louis Le Nain, also from 1645:

Finally, here is the one of the two main energy sources for industrial manufacture:

The other being water-wheels. That last painting is "The Mill", 1648 by Rembrandt.

12 comments:

While I'm capable of seeing these paintings with a romantic eye, they don't convey certain important details such as the smell of feces which was probably a constant at least in the rural villages or the prevalence of diseases that not only caused early death but also blindness, mental retardation, and disfigurement.

Stuart: Your take on the rise and relative fall of Netherland's wealth? They used protofossil fuel, peat, to build much of that wealth. Then England+Wales with lots of coal passed 'em like they wuz standin' still. (E.A. Wrigley, 2010.Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge. Wrigley's take was that coal was used first (of course) as thermal energy: smelting, glass, heating, etc. which built demand. And demand led to positive feedback of more demand, which facilitated what (at great risk of being criticized by Greg "coal played no role in the Industrial Revolution" Clark) some people call the IR. Mechanical energy from coal came later, as the steam engine evolved---pretty slowly. I would love your take. Regards, Donps. I accept Clark's argument that spinning cotton is the archetypical economic model for the IR and spinning used little steam power, at the outset.

Nice pictures and insights into that earlier time; thanks for posting! Of course the backdrop of all of these is relatively untrammeled nature. Things will be different if industrial civilization winds down to a more local, less energy-intensive future. Pictures from such future times might be from only a few regions still habitable due to climate change, and might include chickens peeking out of rusting hulks of automobiles and evidences of (let's hope not too desperate) efforts to keep electricity flowing.

ColdNorth: I hadn't seen that article (thx!) but I had the impression from Wrigley's book that peat was playing a similar role to coal in the UK: allowing the cities to expand more without running into the firewood vs food constraint in their hinterland, thus supporting a larger number or artisans/merchants/etc in the cities and thus higher wealth production.

There are a few illustrations in the "Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry" that could be considered as "realistic" depictions of rural life at the time (around 1410), typically in the "calendar gallery" below (february for instance) :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%A8s_Riches_Heures_du_Duc_de_Berry

And later there are also the Bruegel paintings of course :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder

And from much later, you also have the Jean-François Millet paintings :http://www.google.com/search?q=Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois+Millet&hl=fr&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=LLO&rls=org.mozilla:fr:official&prmd=imvnso&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=fGqqTuiHHsbOswar7537Dw&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CBoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1920&bih=980&sei=%20gmqqTrGlH4rNswbds9jUDw

Just that I chanced to be in Stockholm and then D.C. on business - the Russians were a complete serendipitous discovery and then I thought to balance it with some Dutch paintings as I was aware Russia was a particularly poor nation prior to the 20th century. Blogging about it for no more profound reason than that it makes a change from the endless graphs...

Waterwheels were the preferred kinetic energy source due to the ease of fine control by taping the water source. In places like the Netherlands where the flat landscape provided no swift water courses forced a reliance on windmills and animal gins. Until the steam engine made it possible to turn thermal energy into kinetic energy.

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About Me

I'm a scientist and innovator in the technology industry, with a broad range of interests and experiences. I have a Physics PhD, MS in CS, and have done research, lived in cohousing communities, run a business, and designed technology products. Professionally, I have mainly worked on computer security problems. Currently I'm Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Cornell, but this blog represents my views only.
Email me at stuart -- at -- earlywarn -- dot -- org. I do read all email, but because the blog is a part-time unfunded enterprise, I often fail to reply due to lack of time - apologies.